Part 11 of 17 · 2 minEight Months

Amma found Bujji that night sitting on the floor of the bathroom with the door open, not crying, just sitting.

She sat down on the floor opposite him, which she was too tired to do and did anyway.

"I did the voice," Bujji said.

"I know."

"Chinnu says I have to stop."

"Chinnu is right. But that is not why you are on the bathroom floor."

Bujji thought about it. "She said *sorry sorry*," he said. "To Nanna. She keeps saying sorry and she didn't do anything."

Amma was quiet for a moment. Then she said:

"You cried for eight months."

"What?"

"When you were a baby. Not some nights. Every night. From about eleven o'clock until three in the morning, for eight months, and no doctor could find anything wrong with you, and you would not take milk from me, and you would not sleep in the cradle, and the only thing on this earth that would settle you was being carried up and down the veranda."

"By you?"

"Sometimes by me. I had to be at the bank at nine. So mostly," said Amma, "by her."

Bujji looked at his mother.

"She was sixty-seven," said Amma. "She walked you up and down that veranda from eleven until three, every night, for eight months. Four hours. Fifteen hundred times up and down, I used to calculate it in my head, lying there listening to her feet. And in the morning she made the coffee and did the rice and never once said anything about it."

"Did I say sorry?"

"You did not say anything, Bujji. You were a baby. You screamed in her ear for four hours a night and then you were sick down her only good sari and you did not say sorry, and she did not want you to."

Bujji sat with that.

"She doesn't remember doing it," he said. "Does she."

"No."

"Then it doesn't count."

"It counts," said Amma. "It just doesn't count for *her* any more. So now it has to count for us. That is the whole arrangement, kanna. That is what a family is. Somebody carries you for four hours a night and never mentions it, and then a long time afterwards it is your turn, and you do not mention it either."